topics: |  language | origin | cognitive | storytelling

an interesting thesis - that stories - other people's lives - are
interesting and informative because we can project them onto our lives, and
thereby find guidance in some of our own quests.  Parables [e.g. Chicken
soup for the soul] are stories explicitly designed for this.  The steps in
this projection involve evaluation, planning, image schemas (structures
where one action causes another, etc.), metonymy (things in stories stand
for issues confrontiong us).  now turner goes on to argue, such stories
precede language, are precultural in some primitive sense of being able to
describe (somehow?) events, particularly spatial events that involve our
bodies.  stories thus constitute the foundation from which language arose.

provocative - but is it convincingly argued?  far from it.  there is some
evidence presented, but it is rather weak, i would think.  After the first
two chapters, the argument degenerates into a long list of metaphors of the
Johnson and Lakoff variety - how our body patterns actions and actions result
in actions (manipulations) and how such spatial aspects are projected onto
non-space to create stories.  The chapter on how concepts are blended - e.g.
the yacht Great America II in 1993, is trying to race the clipper _Northern
Light_, which made the passage in 76 days, 8 hours, in 1853.  This is a
"blend" - where the spaces are not source and target, yet they are combined.
All this is of some interest, but it does not further the main argument too
far.

i was impressed, though, to find that mark turner reads homer in the
original.  but i found it disappointingly old europeenne that even in long
verse quotations, he would expect us to read ancient greek as well.

Excerpts

from preface:
Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge,
and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified
by projection — one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one
story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle that shows up
everywhere...

We interpret every level of our experience by means of parable. In this book,
I investigate the mechanisms of parable. I explore technical details of the
brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable as
we think, invent, plan, decide, reason, imagine, and persuade. I analyze the
activity of parable, inquire into its origin, speculate about its biological
and developmental bases, and demonstrate its range. In the final chapter, I
explore the possibility that language is not the source of parable but
instead its complex product.

ch 1 : Bedtime with Shahrazad

But there is something odd here. The vizier does not say, "Look, daughter,
this is your current situation: You are comfortable, so comfortable that you have
the leisure to get interested in other people's problems. But if you keep this up,
you will end in pain." Instead, he says, "Once upon a time there was a comfortable
donkey who got interested in the problems of the ox. The donkey, who
thought he was the sharpest thing ever, gave some clever advice to the dullard
ox. It worked amazingly well, at least for the ox, but it had unfortunate consequences
for the donkey. Before you know it, the ox was lolling about in the hay
of contentment while the donkey was sweating and groaning at the ox's labor."

The vizier presents one story that projects to another story whose principal
character is Shahrazad. We, and Shahrazad, are to understand the possible future
story of Shahrazad by projecting onto it the story of the ox and the donkey.
The punch line is that Shahrazad is the donkey. This projection of one story
onto another may seem exotic and literary, and it is — but it is also, like story, a
fundamental instrument of the mind. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is a
literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the second
way in which the human mind is essentially literary.

Parable is the root of the human mind — of thinking, knowing, acting, creating,
and plausibly even of speaking. But the common view, firmly in place for two
and a half millennia, sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary
mind as optional.  This book is an attempt to show how wrong the common view
is and to replace it with a view of the mind that is more scientific, more
accurate, more inclusive, and more interesting, a view that no longer
misrepresents everyday thought and action as divorced from the literary mind.

--blurb
In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to
the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald
Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust,
as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in
parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional
English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp
what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves,
other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of
parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a
powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final
chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that
contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven
Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar,
that language follows from these mental capacities as a
consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.

Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual
activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a
unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics,
neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers
to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and
invention.